Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are operating as part of the Voyager Interstellar Mission, an extended mission to explore the solar system outside the neighborhood of the outer planets. NASA's Voyagers are the two most distant active representatives of humanity and its desire to explore.

Rick Boos

Isn't it amazing that the Voyager spacecrafts have traveled that many years and miles without colliding into something major?

Blackarrow

Not really. Space is huge. Objects big enough to destroy or disable a space probe are very rare, even in the Asteroid Belt (as evidenced by the fact that no spacecraft has been destroyed or disabled while passing through it).

Philip

This month the Voyager project is exactly 40 years old!

In July 1972, NASA accepted the proposal and by mid December 1972, they signed the project agreement, appointed Harris Bud Schurmeier as project manager and assembled a science steering group headed by professor Edward Stone of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

Robert Pearlman

Yesterday, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) put out a press release titled:

Voyager 1 has Left the Solar System, Sudden Changes in Cosmic Rays Indicate

This, understandably, resulted in a flurry of news articles reporting the milestone.

Unfortunately, it was false.

NASA's Voyager team soon issued its own statement, disputing the claim, pointing to their own announcement in December that Voyager had entered a new region of the solar system, called "the magnetic highway," where energetic particles change dramatically.

I believe that Pioneers 10 and 11 were the first artificial objects to leave the solar system. They were both to have crossed Pluto's orbit around 1990, but were heading in opposite directions. We do not know exactly when that happened because we had lost radio contacts with them.

Voyager 1 was the first object to leave the solar system with which we still had radio contact.

Robert Pearlman

As of today, Pioneer 10 is 109.224 AU from the Sun, Pioneer 11 is 88.780 AU, Voyager 2 is 102.690 AU and Voyager 1 is 125.405 AU.

Thus Voyager 1 is further out than either Pioneer and crossed into interstellar space first.

Headshot

Thanks for the correction. That's a really cool site too.

Blackarrow

Voyager 1: humanity's most distant reach.

lspooz

NASA's Voyager has great info on the data analysis leading to the announcement, including an audio link demonstrating the 'pitch change' in vibrations measured in interstellar plasma versus solar plasma.

A mere 148 kilometers across, diminutive Despina was discovered in 1989, in images from the Voyager 2 spacecraft taken during its encounter with the solar system's most distant gas giant planet. But looking through the Voyager 2 data 20 years later, amateur image processor and philosophy professor Ted Stryk discovered something no one had recognized before -- images that show the shadow of Despina in transit across Neptune's blue cloud tops.